“That’s right,” Lona said. Just echoing what she heard in my voice. She knew it was true. It just hadn’t occurred to her.
“All right.” Ginny said. “I can accept that.” Back-to-business Ginny Fistoulari. “We’ll take the case on that basis. I don’t know what all I’ll need from you, but I’d like to start with a list of her friends. Names, addresses, phone numbers for everyone you can think of.”
“Sergeant Encino asked that. I thought you’d want a copy.” She got up and handed Ginny a sheet of paper, then went back to her chair. She never turned her face away from me the whole time. We weren’t finished with each other yet.
But Ginny wasn’t finished either. Maybe she didn’t like being left out of the silence. She stood it for half a minute, then said, “I’ve just got one more question, Mrs. Axbrewder. Alathea disappeared last week Tuesday. Why did you wait more than a week to call me?”
“Sergeant Encino told me to wait and try not to worry. He told me she’d come back when she was ready. I thought I was doing what Richard—what Richard would want me to do. But then I read, in yesterday’s paper—I read about that Christie girl.” She was under too much strain. Her brittleness was starting to crack. “Since she didn’t come home, I’ve been reading the paper every day. Every word. I’ve been looking for some kind of news that would tell me what happened.
“Yesterday I read about that poor Christie girl. Carol Christie. The paper said”—she was right on the edge—“she ran away from home three months ago, and Monday they found her body in the river. She was just thirteen, the same age as my Alathea.” Her hands were jammed into her hair, pulling at the sides of her head as if that was the only way she could keep herself from crying. “The same age.”
I didn’t have anything else to offer, so I gave her something to get mad about, hoping it would help her hang onto herself. “But why us, Lona? Why me? If you have to have a detective, you could’ve called some of Richard’s friends on the force. They would’ve referred you to someone you could trust.”
“Because you owe me!” Her sudden vehemence was as physical as a fist. “You took my husband away from me! You owe me my daughter back!”
“We’ll do our best.” Ginny came between Lona and me as if she were afraid we were about to start hitting each other. “There are no guarantees in this business, but we’ll do everything we can. Which is more than the police are doing.
“Now.” Ginny was on her feet, and I joined her. Force of habit. I didn’t actually feel strong enough to stand. And I sure didn’t want to tower over Lona like that. It was a cheap advantage, and with her I didn’t want any cheap advantages. But I’ve been following Ginny so long now, taking orders from her, I hardly ever think about it anymore. “There’s one thing we have to settle before we can get started. My fee.”
“There doesn’t have to be any fee,” I said, ashamed money had ever been mentioned.
“Mrs. Axbrewder has to pay something,” Ginny snapped. “If she doesn’t, I can’t call her my client. And if she isn’t my client, I don’t have any legal standing. Anybody who wants to can tell me to stuff it.”
There was no help for it. Lona was looking at me, and I had to say, “She’s right, Lona.”
She didn’t say anything for a long minute. When she found her voice again, she wasn’t angry any more, just weak and helpless, and at the end of her rope. “I don’t have much,” she said. “Richard’s pension is so small. And my job—I work as much as I can, cleaning house for some of the neighbors. It’s hardly enough to pay for clothes.” Then she said, “I have a hundred dollars.”
Ginny said, “Fifty will be plenty.” Fifty bucks would just about pay two days’ rent on her office. “If I get in trouble with the commission I can always tell them it was only an advance.”
The commission frowns on private investigators who work cheap. The same kind of argument doctors and lawyers use—people who work cheap are presumed to be shoddy and unscrupulous. Unprofessional. If I still had a license, I’d be in danger of losing it twice a day.
Lona shuffled out of the room and came back a minute later with the money. Ginny took it without counting it and gave her a receipt. Before I could think of anything else to say, Ginny and I were out on the walk again and Lona had closed the door behind us. In the whole time I hadn’t had one good look at her face.
Ginny made straight for the car, but I dawdled along for a moment. Though the sun was getting hotter, in the shade of the trees it was still bearable. I wasn’t eager to sear my butt on the vinyl of the Olds. And I wasn’t satisfied, either. There were things I needed to know.
“All right,” I said at Ginny’s back. “Spill it.”
She stopped, then turned around, looking blank. “Spill what?”
But she couldn’t fool me with that. Her face has more than one kind of blank, and this wasn’t the right kind. Besides, she’d turned around too quickly—like she was expecting me to say something.
“You know what I’m talking about.”
She came back toward me a couple of steps. “When you’ve been drinking I never know what you’re talking about.”
That was a cheap shot, and she knew it. As soon as she said it, she winced in regret. But I sloughed it off. It just confirmed she knew something she wasn’t telling. So I said, “The hell you don’t. You’re scared of this case, Fistoulari. You’re scared of it because of me. You’re afraid something about it is going to get to me. I want to know why.”
“You heard her.” Ginny nodded at the house. “She didn’t tell me any secrets.”
“Yeah,” I growled. “First you’re worried about me, and then you won’t tell me why. If you’ve got so goddamn little confidence in me, why didn’t you just leave me out of it? You don’t need me to find a runaway.”
Now she came close and looked right up at me. “She’s your niece. You’ve got a right to be involved. Besides, I thought you’d want—”
“Don’t say it. Of course I want to help find her.” For a minute I glanced around the neighborhood, looking for suggestions. Then I locked on to her again. Something about that broken nose of hers did funny things to my insides. Sometimes I wanted to kiss it so bad I had to grit my teeth. Now I wanted to hit it. “Maybe I’m asking the wrong question. Let’s be professional about it. It’s just a case. Like any other case. There’s just one thing wrong with it. You don’t do missing persons. Why start now?”
“She’s your—”
I didn’t let her finish. “Don’t do me any favors.”
That got through to her. All of a sudden, her eyes went cold and narrow, and her nostrils flared. Just for a second, her voice had the soft hot sound of an acetylene torch. “That’s cute, Axbrewder. All right, you want it? You got it. I read the papers, too. I read about Carol Christie. There’s one little fact your sister-in-law neglected to mention. According to her parents, Carol Christie was an excellent swimmer.”
An excellent swimmer. Oh, hell. You don’t have to be an excellent swimmer to be safe in the Flat River. If you’re half as tall as I am, you don’t have to know how to swim at all.
“When a reporter asked the cops if they had any reason to think she might’ve been killed,” she went on, “they didn’t deny it.”
I scanned the neighborhood one more time. It still looked like the kind of place where nothing ever happened. It was too tidy, and there was too much sunshine.
I turned my back on it and followed Ginny to the Olds.
3
While she started the engine, I pulled down the sunshade to give my aching head a little protection. Then, more to let her know I was still with her than to satisfy my curiosity, I asked, “Where do we go from here?”
She glanced over at me. “How long has it been since you had a full meal?”
That was the kind of question she usually asked me. I shrugged. She didn’t need an answer.
As we pulled away from the curb, she muttered, “You ought to be more careful. If you don’t get regular meals, it?
??ll stunt your growth.”
I suppose I should’ve at least grinned. She was just trying to clear the air. But I didn’t have the energy for it. The little strength I had I was using to think about thirteen-year-old girls who end up dead in the river for no good reason. As far as I knew, there was zero connection between Carol Christie and Alathea, but just knowing something like that could happen to my niece gave me a cold pain in the stomach.
And maybe there was a connection. In this business, things like that happen all the time. Accidents happen by themselves—crimes have a way of tying themselves together. I was in no mood to grin at bad jokes, even when I knew why Ginny was making them.
We didn’t have to go far to find food. In a few blocks, we were in one of those small business sections that looks like someone just dropped a bunch of white concrete bricks out of the sky and ran away before anybody could catch him and make him clean it up. Pawnshops, grocery stores, insurance offices, and gas stations stood facing every which way. With all that sun on them, they were blinding—I could hardly tell them apart. But Ginny’s eyes handle brightness better than mine, and after a couple of minutes she pulled into a Muchoburger that was just opening up. We went inside, ordered cheeseburgers and about a gallon of coffee, then sat down at one of the tables.
We didn’t talk while we waited for the food, and after that I was too busy eating half-raw hamburger and the vitamin pills that Ginny handed out like my life depended on them. When she’d had enough to eat, she got down to business.
“We need to talk to this Sergeant Encino. But he probably doesn’t come on duty until midafternoon, so we’ve got five or six hours to do our homework. I suppose we could start with this list of Alathea’s friends, but I’d rather wait until they get home from school, so they can’t check what they’re saying with each other—just in case there’s something going on that they want to keep secret.”
I nodded. My stomach didn’t much like what I was putting in it. But I liked it better than the dread.
“Any suggestions?”
She was just being polite. She knew what our choices were as well as I did. But she was usually polite when we were just starting a case. That was generally the only time when she wasn’t way ahead of me. As soon as she had a handle on what was happening, she wouldn’t waste time being polite.
Anyway, I owed her some politeness myself. And if she was giving me a choice, I wanted to use it. There were some things I wasn’t ready for yet, so I said, “We might as well go to the school while we’re out this way. It’s closer than your office.”
That must have been what she wanted to do herself. She said, “Good enough,” and went to pay the check. I finished up, drank down as much of that coffee as I could stand. Then we got in the car and drove to Mountain Junior High over on the corner of Mission and Natividad.
It wasn’t the best junior high in the city—the best ones are called middle schools—but it was far enough from the old part of town to be better than the worst. It didn’t look like a converted warehouse, and it wasn’t cramped into a plot of ground too small to hold that many kids, and it didn’t have a chain-link fence around it. In fact, it had several buildings built around one another, and there was a small gymnasium and a ragged playing field. It was the sort of place where some kids would be perfectly happy—and some would get started on drugs.
We went in and found our way to the main office, where Ginny showed her ID to a secretary and asked to see the principal. The secretary informed us the principal was “out.” But when she heard why we were here, she told us the vice-principal was really the person we ought to talk to. Vice-principal Rumsfeld was “in.”
She was a taut little woman with a severe hairstyle and an air of terminal fatigue, worn out by burdens. You could tell by the tension compressing her lips that she was responsible for “discipline” and had long since used up whatever tolerance she was born with.
Her office suited her. It was stark and forbidding, and the chairs were uncomfortable. Probably in her career she’d seen thousand of kids squirming on those chairs. Probably Ginny and I didn’t look much different to her than those kids.
“You want to know about Alathea Axbrewder.” She sounded like a blunt instrument. “There’s nothing I can tell you. She came to school last week Tuesday, but didn’t attend any of her classes after fifth period. That was physical education. She hasn’t been here since. In the old days, we had truant officers who tracked down runaways, but now the police are supposed to handle it. They do a poor job.”
“What about Alathea herself?” At times like this, Ginny was a model of diplomacy. She could be firm, even insistent, without sounding pushy or irritating people.
“What do you want to know about her? She was a good student, bright and pleasant. Her teachers liked her, and she didn’t get into trouble. She seemed more grown up than most girls her age. That happens quite often when a child loses a parent. The added pressure forces them to mature more rapidly.”
“She doesn’t sound like the kind of girl who runs away.”
Vice-principal Rumsfeld’s lips got tighter, and her hairdo suddenly seemed even more severe. “What kind of girl is that, Ms. Fistoulari? All kinds of children run away.”
“At thirteen?”
“They run away because they are in pain. No one is immune to pain—not even children.”
The stiffness in her voice made me revise my opinion of her. She wasn’t the Wicked Witch of the West. She was tired because she was the school’s disciplinarian, and she didn’t like her job. I said softly, “That bothers you.”
“It concerns me, Mr. Axbrewder. A society that can’t care for its children is in very serious trouble. I do what is in my power here, but I’m a poor substitute for a healthy family or a constructive sense of life. When a child like Alathea runs away, she places herself entirely beyond my reach.”
“Ms. Rumsfeld,” I said, “Alathea didn’t run away.”
She looked at me sharply. “Do you have some reason to believe that?”
“She’s my niece. I know her pretty well.”
“Your confidence is misplaced. Alathea isn’t the first young girl to run away, and won’t be the last. I admit that in the past most runaways were boys. Perhaps as boys they believed they were expected to be adventuresome. But in recent years, more and more girls have done the same. Twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, Mr. Axbrewder.”
“How recently is that?” Ginny asked.
“I can’t say—I’ve only been aware of it for the last year or so. Fortunately, Alathea is the first from our school, but other junior high and middle schools have had more than their share.”
“Can you give us any details?” Ginny was groping—but that’s normal. At the beginning of a case, you have to look under every rock you find.
“I don’t have any,” Ms. Rumsfeld said. “I don’t see what possible use they could be to you, but if you feel compelled to look for them, the school board may be willing to help you.” She was dismissing us. “In a case as serious as a runaway, the board receives copies of all reports as a matter of course. In fact, they have copies of all our files on every student.”
Ginny and I stood up. Ginny thanked her for her time and turned to open the door. I said, “When we find out what happened to her, we’ll let you know.”
“Don’t find out what happened to her,” the vice-principal snapped. “Find her. Bring her back.”
“We’ll try,” Ginny said. She ushered me out of the door, and we went back to the Olds.
Sitting in the car, she said, “Maybe she did run away.”
“Maybe none of them ran away,” I countered.
After a minute she said, “Right.” She put the Olds in gear, and we headed in the direction of her office.
Fistoulari Investigations is in the Murchison Building, one of the three buildings in Puerta del Sol that stands more than five stories tall. It’s on the other side of the city from Mountain Junior High, but the new freeway makes it fairly easy
to get to. We had the Olds parked in the basement garage and were on our way up in the elevator before noon.
We hadn’t been working on it very long, but so far I had the distinct impression that we weren’t getting anywhere. If something had happened to Alathea, it was a secret, and we didn’t know who could tell us what it was. So we had to start trying to eliminate the obvious.
The Murchison Building isn’t cheap, but it isn’t as expensive as it looks. It sits in what used to be the business center of Puerta del Sol, a good three miles down Paseo Grande from the ritzy real estate where the banks live these days. The owners have always had trouble attracting tenants, and the place is never more than two-thirds occupied. Which is why Ginny can afford to operate there, along with a handful of half-reputable lawyers, some chancy doctors, and a few insurance companies that may or may not have any assets. The elevator and the halls are carpeted, but the lighting is bad so you can’t see that they don’t clean very often. Too many of the walls have the kind of smudges you would expect to find in places where people get arrested regularly—the kind sweaty palms make while the rest of the body is being frisked.
But Ginny’s office is in good condition. FISTOULARI INVESTIGATIONS is neatly lettered on the door, and inside the air-conditioning works. The waiting room has a plastic potted plant, a side table covered with old magazines, and only three chairs. But three chairs is about all it needs—most people won’t even bother to wait in a private investigator’s office if someone else is already there. And the office itself is at least comfortable. It holds Ginny’s desk and files, a large sofa, a couple of roomy chairs, two phones, and a picture window looking out toward the valley of the Flat River. The carpet is clean because I keep it that way. The walls are bare except for a couple of framed diplomas and the display copy of Ginny’s license—all part of making the place look “professional.”
Fortunately, there was no one in the waiting room, so she didn’t have to juggle clients. We went into the office, and I started up the electric coffeepot while she went through her mail. After she’d read it all—and thrown most of it into the wastebasket—we went to work.